MARCELLOMERCADO

Mar­cel­lo Mer­ca­do’s work is rese­arch as prac­tice: the artist enga­ges with a cul­tu­re of expe­ri­men­ta­ti­on and his work spans a wide ran­ge of media of equal impor­t­an­ce. Ana­lo­gue working methods form a vital part of the artist’s work, in addi­ti­on to his use of data string pro­ces­sing, gene­tic mate­ri­als and advan­ced tech­no­lo­gies as media, which he enga­ges with play­ful­ly as if he were play­ing a key­board. He is a poe­tic artist; both a trans­for­mer and seis­mo­graph, he brid­ges gaps bet­ween digi­tal and orga­nic worlds.
Mercado’s can­va­ses in oil, acrylic, and pig­ment move bet­ween the fic­titious and the real, the figu­ra­ti­ve and the abs­tract. The artist dedi­ca­tes him­s­elf to ethi­cal and phi­lo­so­phi­cal the­mes in his use of dark and illu­mi­na­ted are­as of the image as dis­play­ed in his works ‘Schwar­zes ver­wun­de­te s Tier 1/2’, ‘The Loca­ti­on’ and ‘Schnee’, whe­re domi­nant dark pur­ple and black, or pale blue tones and patches of colour in vibrant magen­ta open up new per­spec­tives. Mer­ca­do works
against the light once again in his lar­ge sca­le pain­ting ‘Hei­mat­licht’, a work that ser­ves as a memo­ry of his Argen­ti­nean roots and resem­bles a wall span­ning mural. Smal­ler for­mat works such as “Erd­kern I/II” and “STZ3” are pre­cise reduc­tions, whe­re­as “BLR”, “GTRXD”, “Ur-Blau” and “Post­mo­der­ne Distan­zie­run­gen I/II” crea­te con­trast. They emer­ge as three dimen­sio­nal objects with their employ­ment of salt crystals, ena­mel and chalk.
Mercado’s stra­te­gy with his lar­ge for­mat drawings is simi­lar and yet somehow dif­fe­rent. In the­se works he col­la­bo­ra­tes with small robots that he deli­be­r­a­te­ly des­patches across the paper. When stee­red remo­te­ly or via their own move­ments, they crea­te fine lay­ers, line­ar figu­res and a kine­tic, elec­tri­fied regis­trar that Mer­ca­do redraws and accen­tua­tes in a figu­ra­ti­ve man­ner, as demons­tra­ted in his drawing depic­ting an amphi­bi­an, ‘Hein­rich’. With the­se works, the artist aims to dis­co­ver and sketch all pos­si­ble micro ele­ments and details, to ren­der the invi­si­ble visi­ble, as illus­tra­ted in his
lar­ge for­mat work ‘Map­ping’.
Mercado’s video works are the result of inten­si­ve peri­ods of rese­arch in which he seeks to gene­ra­te an objec­tified and audio-visu­al sen­se of time. In “Summa/Notationen” he redu­ces musi­cal inter­pre­ta­ti­ons of Mozart’s clas­sic Don Gio­van­ni to dura­ti­ons of one second each. In “Löschen/Delete” Mer­ca­do has crea­ted his own alpha­bet as a poe­tic series of ges­tu­res using moving ideo­grams. In “Hybriding_Text” he poses the ques­ti­on: “What do the gre­at peop­le, the key thin­kers, lea­ve behind?” In this game of qua­li­ty ver­sus quan­ti­ty Plato’s works encom­pass 375 KB in digi­tal form; Confucius’s are 2 MB and tho­se of the aut­hor Jor­ge Luis Bor­ges are equal to 125 MB. Mer­ca­do descri­bes his lar­gest video work “Das Kapi­tal”, which he worked on for ten years and spans 40 hours in its ori­gi­nal ver­si­on, as an ‘ora­to­ri­um’. The 15′ 58’’ excerpt in the exhi­bi­ti­on shows the net worth of exces­si­ve work in its per­man­ent­ly inef­fi­ci­ent dis­so­lu­ti­on and
rege­ne­ra­ti­on of new struc­tures. It con­cerns image and ener­gy pro­duc­tion of amal­gam land­s­capes with enor­mous net­work ten­ta­cles, foi­led by the bodies of mur­de­red human beings of the dic­ta­tor­ship in Argen­ti­na. Or, as media phi­lo­so­pher Sieg­fried Zielin­ski expres­sed it, “In his (Mercado’s) ani­ma­ti­ons the images of the mal­trea­ted bodies of peop­le and ani­mals have dis­sol­ved, as if in an acid bath. They then sud­den­ly reap­pe­ar in cer­tain sequen­ces in their ori­gi­nal form, like memo­ries.”